News from Division of Geological and Planetary Scienceshttp://gps.divisions.caltech.edu/news-events/news/rssen-usFri, 22 Feb 2019 14:25:28 +0000JPL News: NASA's Opportunity Rover Mission on Mars Comes to Endhttp://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/jpl-news-nasas-opportunity-rover-mission-mars-comes-end-85327<p>One of the most successful and enduring feats of interplanetary exploration, NASA&#39;s Opportunity rover mission is at an end after almost 15 years exploring the surface of Mars and helping lay the groundwork for NASA&#39;s return to the Red Planet.</p><p>The Opportunity rover stopped communicating with Earth when a severe Mars-wide dust storm blanketed its location in June 2018. After more than a thousand commands to restore contact, engineers in the Space Flight Operations Facility at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, made their last attempt to revive Opportunity Tuesday, to no avail. The solar-powered rover&#39;s final communication was received June 10.</p><p>&quot;It is because of trailblazing missions such as Opportunity that there will come a day when our brave astronauts walk on the surface of Mars,&quot; said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. &quot;And when that day arrives, some portion of that first footprint will be owned by the men and women of Opportunity, and a little rover that defied the odds and did so much in the name of exploration.&quot;</p><p>Read the full story at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7334&amp;utm_source=iContact&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=nasajpl&amp;utm_content=mereom20190213-1">JPL News</a>.</p>http://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/jpl-news-nasas-opportunity-rover-mission-mars-comes-end-85327Famed Oceanographer Walter Munk (BS '39, MS '40) Dead at 101http://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/famed-oceanographer-walter-munk-bs-39-ms-40-dead-101-85320<p>Alumnus Walter Munk (BS &#39;39, MS &#39;40), often called the &quot;Einstein of oceanography,&quot; passed away on February 8. He was 101 years old.</p><p>Munk&#39;s early research on quantitative prediction of surf conditions was instrumental in ensuring the success of Allied amphibious landings during World War II. As a professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla, California, he pioneered the use of sound waves for studying the ocean&#39;s structure, demystified the phenomenon of tidal locking, and led a global study of sea temperature that conclusively demonstrated the reality of climate change.</p><p>Possessed of a gift for translating observations of nature into profound quantitative descriptions, Munk laid the foundations of modern physical oceanography. A maverick who championed brave, revolutionary ideas, Munk was the first to understand the influence of tidal forces on the rotation of planets, the first to use power spectra to describe waves, and was one of the first scuba divers on an oceanographic expedition.&nbsp;</p><p>&quot;Walter was a legend in the field. I can hardly get through a couple lectures in my introduction to oceanography course without mentioning one of his major contributions,&quot; says fellow oceanographer Andrew Thompson, professor of environmental science and engineering at Caltech, who earned his PhD at Scripps. &quot;It was a privilege to meet and talk with Walter as a graduate student and to see, firsthand, his love of science.&quot; &nbsp;</p><p>&quot;He enjoyed interacting with students and would open up his house every year to welcome incoming graduates at Scripps&#39;s open house,&quot; Thompson remembers. &quot;It was also remarkable and inspiring to see him giving insightful, challenging, and entertaining presentations, and publishing new ideas well into his 90s. He will be greatly missed, but his contributions will continue to shape the field of oceanography for generations.&quot;</p><p>Munk was born in October 19, 1917, in Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which would dissolve just over a year later at the end of World War I. After the war, Munk&#39;s parents divorced, and he was raised by his mother. In 1932, she sent Munk to a boy&#39;s preparatory school in New York, hoping to ready him for career in finance, the family business.&nbsp;</p><p>Six years later, Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, by which time Munk was an undergraduate at Caltech studying applied physics. &nbsp;</p><p>&quot;I made a mess of [finance] and didn&#39;t like it, and then went as far as I could from New York into Pasadena,&quot; recalled Munk in an interview for the Niels Bohr Library and Archives oral histories project. &quot;I very naively appeared at the Caltech dean&#39;s office, telling him I was going to come, and he asked me to wait till he got my file. I said, &#39;There isn&#39;t any file. I didn&#39;t realize I had to go apply before I came.&#39; It was a marvel; it was amazing that I got in at all.&quot;</p><p>Munk had broad academic interests as an undergraduate and discovered oceanography only by chance; his girlfriend was spending the summer in La Jolla, and he took a job at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to be closer to her.</p><p>It didn&#39;t work out with the girl, but Munk&#39;s experience at Scripps helped him develop a fierce and enduring fascination with the ocean that would set the tempo for the rest of his life. He asked his adviser, Harald Ulrik Sverdrup, to take him on as a graduate student.&nbsp;</p><p>A world away, Hitler had just annexed Austria, and Munk&#39;s family was forced to flee the new Nazi regime. They resettled in Pasadena. Munk applied for U.S. citizenship in 1939 and enlisted in the Army&#39;s ski battalion after earning his master&#39;s degree at Caltech in 1940. &quot;I didn&#39;t wait, wasn&#39;t drafted,&quot; he recalled. &quot;I joined as an enlisted man. &hellip; I volunteered, and I did not volunteer the fact that I&#39;d gone to university when I joined.&quot; His education wouldn&#39;t stay secret for long. A little over a year after he enlisted, Sverdrup asked Munk to join a defense-related research project at Scripps. Munk agreed and arranged for a discharge on the basis of his unique background in oceanography. &nbsp;</p><p>Working with Sverdrup, Munk developed the first quantitative method for predicting surf conditions. The coast of northwest Africa is notorious for dangerous winter waves, which could overturn landing craft, killing servicemen and potentially derailing entire amphibious operations. The pair developed formulas that could be used to predict the severity of surf on a given day, ensuring the success of amphibious operations in Africa, the Pacific, and the Normandy landings of 1944. Munk described the work&nbsp;<a href="http://www.caltech.edu/news/gps-grads-return-90th-anniversary-77562">at a 2017 Caltech symposium</a>&nbsp;marking the 90th anniversary of the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences.</p><p>After the war, Munk remained involved in defense research, joining a team of oceanographers working as consultants on the American atomic bomb tests in the Pacific. He also invented the tsunami early-warning system and discovered the role of deep waves in mixing deep ocean waters before earning his PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, and joining the Scripps faculty as an assistant professor in 1947.&nbsp;</p><p>Over the next decade, he performed the first rigorous quantitative analysis to show how ocean tides act over geologic time to slow the planet&#39;s rotation and force the moon to spiral slowly away from the earth. He later discovered tidal locking, the phenomenon that forces the same face of the moon to point earthward. Munk&#39;s mathematics hold wherever we find tidally locked bodies in the universe, from the moons of Jupiter and Saturn to alien worlds huddled in the narrow halos of habitable space ringing their cold red-dwarf suns.</p><p>With his appointment first to full professor in 1954 and later to associate director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) in 1959, Munk&#39;s career progressed in tandem with his research. IGPP was itself a product of Munk&#39;s vision of an oceanographic field integrated with the broader fields of geophysics and planetary science, and it was funded, designed, constructed, and operated through his efforts and those of his wife, Judith.</p><p>Munk served on one of the committees of the International Geophysical Year in 1958 and later joined geologist Harry Hess on Project Mohole, an ambitious project to drill into the earth&#39;s mantle. The project ultimately failed, but in demonstrating that ocean drilling was possible, Munk and his colleagues catalyzed a revolution in humanity&#39;s understanding of geology and Earth history. In Munk&#39;s view, failure wasn&#39;t something to be avoided. &quot;I&#39;ve failed so many times,&quot; he said in an interview with&nbsp;<em>Triton&nbsp;</em>magazine on the occasion of his 100th birthday in 2017. &quot;People are so afraid of doing something that doesn&#39;t work. We ought to encourage students to experiment and make mistakes. We ought to give degrees for experiments done very well that have failed.&quot;</p><p>During this time, Munk joined the Ocean Studies Board of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) as chairman, and he sat on the President&#39;s Science Advisory Committee and the Naval Research Advisory Committee. He was also a member of JASON, a group of elite researchers that advise the military on scientific issues.&nbsp;</p><p>Despite his growing involvement in policy, Munk spent much of the 1960s crisscrossing the Pacific. He lived on Tutuila, American Samoa, while researching very long Pacific swells and set up monitoring stations from New Zealand to Alaska to prove his hypothesis that the swells circumnavigate the earth on a great-circle route from their origins in the Southern Hemisphere&#39;s massive storms. This was Munk&#39;s first large ocean experiment.</p><p>Over the next decades, Munk improved his tide-prediction models and created instruments to measure tides in the open sea as part of the Mid-Ocean Dynamics Experiment. In 1981, after discovering that internal waves in the deep ocean affect the propagation of sound through water, he developed the ocean acoustic tomography technique to study shifting structures within the ocean, features he called &quot;underwater weather.&quot;&nbsp;</p><p>In the 1990s, Munk began applying ocean acoustic tomography to environmental problems. He joined the Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis (MEDEA) program, former Vice President Al Gore&#39;s environmental task force, and used his research methods to monitor sea levels and demystify the melting processes of ice sheets. Munk also launched one of his largest experiments ever: the Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate (ATOC) project, which measured sea temperatures in the North Pacific Ocean using a global array of underwater speakers and receivers.&nbsp;</p><p>Even decades after his official retirement, Munk remained involved in research and scientific advisory efforts. He published his last peer-reviewed paper in 2015 at age 98 and, in that same year, participated in the Vatican City conferences on climate change attended by Pope Francis. He held the Secretary of the Navy/Chief of Naval Operations Oceanography Chair at Scripps until his death.&nbsp;</p><p>Munk was a member of the NAS and the Russian Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the Royal Society. He was the recipient of numerous national and international honors including the National Medal of Science (1983); the Crafoord Prize (2010); the Vetlesen Prize, sometimes called the &quot;Nobel Prize in geology&quot; (1993); the NAS Agassiz Medal; the Kyoto Prize, Japan&#39;s highest award for global achievement; and the inaugural Prince Albert I Medal (2001), given by Prince Rainier of Monaco in partnership with the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans.&nbsp;</p><p>He is survived by his wife, Mary, his daughters Edie and Kendall, and other family.</p>http://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/famed-oceanographer-walter-munk-bs-39-ms-40-dead-101-85320Q&A: Creating a "Virtual Seismologist"http://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/qa-creating-virtual-seismologist-84789<p>Understanding earthquakes is a challenging problem&mdash;not only because they are potentially dangerous but also because they are complicated phenomena that are difficult to study. Interpreting the massive, often convoluted data sets that are recorded by earthquake monitoring networks is a herculean task for seismologists, but the effort involved in producing accurate analyses could significantly improve the development of reliable earthquake early-warning systems.&nbsp;</p><p>A promising new collaboration between Caltech seismologists and computer scientists using artificial intelligence (AI)&mdash;computer systems capable of learning and performing tasks that previously required humans&mdash;aims to improve the automated processes that identify earthquake waves and assess the strength, speed, and direction of shaking in real time. The collaboration includes researchers from the divisions of Geological and Planetary Sciences and Engineering and Applied Science, and is part of Caltech&#39;s <a href="http://www.ist.caltech.edu/ai4science/">AI4Science Initiative</a> to apply AI to the big-data problems faced by scientists throughout the Institute. Powered by advanced hardware and machine-learning algorithms, modern AI has the potential to revolutionize seismological data tools and make all of us a little safer from earthquakes.&nbsp;</p><p>Recently, Caltech&#39;s <a href="http://eas.caltech.edu/people/yyue">Yisong Yue</a>, an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences, sat down with his collaborators, Research Professor of Geophysics <a href="http://www.gps.caltech.edu/people/egill-hauksson">Egill Hauksson</a>, Postdoctoral Scholar in Geophysics <a href="http://www.gps.caltech.edu/people/zachary-e-ross">Zachary Ross</a>, and Associate Staff Seismologist <a href="http://www.gps.caltech.edu/people/men-andrin-meier">Men-Andrin Meier</a>, to discuss the new project and future of AI and earthquake science.&nbsp;</p><h3><strong>What seismological problem inspired you to include AI in your research?</strong></h3><p><strong>Meier:&nbsp;</strong>One of the things that I work on is earthquake early warning. Early warning requires us to try to detect earthquakes very rapidly and predict the shaking that they will produce later so that you can get a few seconds to maybe tens of seconds of warning before the shaking starts.&nbsp;</p><p><strong>Hauksson:&nbsp;</strong>It has to be done very quickly&mdash;that&#39;s the game. The earthquake waves will hit the closest monitoring station first, and if we can recognize them immediately, then we can send out an alert before the waves travel farther.&nbsp;</p><p><strong>Meier:&nbsp;</strong>You only have a few seconds of seismogram to decide whether it is an earthquake, which would mean sending out an alert, or if it is instead a nuisance signal&mdash;a truck driving by one of our seismometers or something like that. We have too many false classifications, too many false alerts, and people don&#39;t like that. This is a classic machine-learning problem: you have some data and you need to make a realistic and accurate classification. So, we reached out to Caltech&#39;s computing and mathematical science (CMS) department and started working on it with them.</p><h3><strong>Why is AI a good tool for improving earthquake monitoring systems?</strong></h3><p><strong>Yue:&nbsp;</strong>The reasons why AI can be a good tool have to do with scale and complexity coupled with an abundant amount of data. Earthquake monitoring systems generate massive data sets that need to be processed in order to provide useful information to scientists. AI can do that faster and more accurately than humans can, and even find patterns that would otherwise escape the human eye. Furthermore, the patterns we hope to extract are hard for rule-based systems to adequately capture, and so the advanced pattern-matching abilities of modern deep learning can offer superior performance than existing automated earthquake monitoring algorithms.</p><p><strong>Ross:&nbsp;</strong>In a big aftershock sequence, for example, you could have events that are spaced every 10 seconds, rapid fire, all day long. We use maybe 400 stations in Southern California to monitor earthquakes, and the waves caused by each different earthquake will hit them all at different times.&nbsp;</p><p><strong>Yue:&nbsp;</strong>When you have multiple earthquakes, and the sensors are all firing at different locations, you want to be able to unscramble which data belong to which earthquake. Cleaning up and analyzing the data takes time. But once you train a machine-learning algorithm&mdash;a computer program that learns by studying examples as opposed to through explicit programing&mdash;to do this, it could make an assessment really quickly. That&#39;s the value.</p><h3><strong>How else will AI help seismologists?</strong></h3><p><strong>Yue:&nbsp;</strong>We are not just interested in the occasional very big earthquake that happens every few years or so. We are interested in the earthquakes of all sizes that happen every day. AI has the potential to identify small earthquakes that are currently indistinguishable from background noise.</p><p><strong>Ross:&nbsp;</strong>On average we see about 50 or so earthquakes each day in Southern California, and we have a mandate from the U.S. Geological Survey to monitor each one. There are many more, but they&#39;re just too small for us to detect with existing technology. And the smaller they are, the more often they occur. What we are trying to do is monitor, locate, detect, and characterize each and every one of those events to build &quot;earthquake catalogs.&quot; All of this analysis is starting to reveal the very intricate details of the physical processes that drive earthquakes. Those details were not really visible before.</p><h3><strong>Why hasn&#39;t anyone applied AI to seismology before?</strong></h3><p><strong>Ross:&nbsp;</strong>Only in the last year or two has seismology started to seriously consider AI technology. Part of it has to do with the dramatic increase in computer processing power that we have seen just within the past decade.</p><h3><strong>What is the long-term goal of this collaboration?</strong></h3><p><strong>Meier:&nbsp;</strong>Ultimately, we want to build an algorithm that mimics what human experts do. A human seismologist can feel an earthquake or see a seismogram and immediately tell a lot of things about that earthquake just from experience. It was really difficult to teach that to a computer. With artificial intelligence, we can get much closer to how a human expert would treat the problem. We are getting much closer to creating a &quot;virtual seismologist.&quot;</p><h3><strong>Why do we need a &quot;virtual seismologist?&quot;</strong></h3><p><strong>Yue:&nbsp;</strong>Fundamentally both in seismology and beyond, the reason that you want to do this kind of thing is scale and complexity. If you can train an AI that learns, then you can take a specialized skill set and make it available to anyone. The other issue is complexity. You could have a human look at detailed seismic data for a long time and uncover small earthquakes. Or you could just have an algorithm learn to pick out the patterns that matter much faster.</p><p><strong>Meier:&nbsp;</strong>The detailed information that we&#39;re gathering helps us figure out the physics of earthquakes&mdash;why they fizzle out along certain faults and trigger big quakes along others, and how often they occur.&nbsp;</p><h3><strong>Will creating a &quot;virtual seismologist&quot; mean the end of human seismologists?</strong></h3><p><strong>Ross:&nbsp;</strong>Having talked to a range of students, I can say with fairly high confidence that most of them don&#39;t want to do cataloguing work. [Laughs.] They would rather be doing more exciting work.</p><p><strong>Yue:&nbsp;</strong>Imagine that you&#39;re a musician and before you can become a musician, first you have to build your own piano. So you spend five years building your piano, and then you become a musician. Now we have an automated way of building pianos&mdash;are we going to destroy musicians&#39; jobs? No, we are actually empowering a new generation of musicians. We have other problems that they could be working on.</p>http://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/qa-creating-virtual-seismologist-84789Murray Lab Helps Scientists See Themselves on Marshttp://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/murray-lab-helps-scientists-see-themselves-mars-84690<p>In November, NASA announced that the upcoming Mars 2020 rover mission will be sent to Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide feature on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator.&nbsp;</p><p>The decision to go to Jezero Crater was the subject of much debate among Mars 2020 scientists. In the end, it came down to a choice between two highly favored landing sites, Jezero and a nearby site called Northeast Syrtis, each of which presented different research opportunities. To determine which to target, the Mars 2020 team relied on assistance from the Bruce Murray Laboratory for Planetary Visualization at Caltech, where researchers compiled disparate data sets about Mars to create multilayered, easy-to-read maps of the landing sites and a 3-D visualization tool.&nbsp;</p><p>&quot;The Murray Lab was incredibly helpful as we determined where to go in 2020,&quot; says <a href="http://www.gps.caltech.edu/people/kenneth-a-farley">Ken Farley</a>, the W. M. Keck Foundation Professor of Geochemistry and project scientist for Mars 2020 at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA. &quot;The lab has the ability to assemble and manipulate the data in a way that makes it accessible to anyone regardless of their background.&quot;</p><p>Known as the Murray Lab for short, the facility was established on the second floor of the Charles Arms Laboratory of the Geological Sciences in 2016 to develop next-generation image-processing capabilities for planetary scientists. The facility is named for the late planetary science pioneer&nbsp;<a href="http://www.caltech.edu/news/bruce-murray-40241">Bruce Murray</a>, a faculty member at Caltech for nearly 50 years and director of JPL from 1976 to 1982. On the surface, the lab appears to be just a room with an enormous TV, a long couch, and a lot of computer servers humming away in the background. In reality, it is both a state-of-the-art image-processing facility and meeting space for examining and discussing those images.</p><p>For the Mars 2020 mission, a team led by Murray Lab manager <a href="http://www.gps.caltech.edu/people/james-jay-dickson">Jay Dickson</a>, research scientist in image processing, processed hundreds of gigabytes of data from NASA&mdash;images, topographical maps, thermal data, and so on&mdash;into files that can be opened using Google Earth. Scientists could do flyovers and generate perspective views based on the data in a free, easy-to-use interface.&nbsp;</p><div style="float: left; margin: 7px 15px 10px 0px; width: 300px;"><a href="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www-prod-storage.cloud.caltech.edu/Mars2020site-GoogleEarth.gif"><img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www-prod-storage.cloud.caltech.edu/Mars2020site-GoogleEarth.gif" width="300" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 12px; width: 90%; color: #333333;"><span style="width: 90%;">A Google Earth flyover of Jezero Crater created using data compiled by the Murray Lab.</span>&nbsp;<em>Credit: Caltech</em></span></div><p>For previous Mars missions, specialist scientists would pore over data sets and satellite images of ground features and then debate possible landing sites armed with PowerPoint presentations.&nbsp;</p><p>&quot;It&#39;s not that easy to just look at images of Mars in a useful way,&quot; says Dickson, who was brought on to the Mars 2020 working group during the summer of 2017. A challenge was that most of the available information about the potential landing sites was gleaned from satellite measurements, and yet many of the scientists tasked with helping to decide which landing site to choose were geologists more used to working directly with samples or in a landscape, not studying it from above.</p><p>To overcome that, the Murray Lab team first stitched together images captured by the Context Camera (CTX) on JPL&#39;s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and then folded in information from disparate data sets&mdash;mineralogy data, for example, and temperature maps that reveal whether a patch of ground is rock or soil.&nbsp;</p><p>The final product, which allows users to navigate a region and seamlessly call up relevant data, represents a democratization of information processing, because it allows a more diverse group of researchers to make informed decisions about the landing site regardless of their skill set, says <a href="http://www.gps.caltech.edu/people/bethany-l-ehlmann">Bethany Ehlmann</a>, a professor of planetary science, JPL research scientist, and member of the Mars 2020 team. &quot;The Murray Lab allowed more people on the Mars 2020 team to get involved in evaluating landing sites.&quot;</p><p>The Murray Lab&#39;s involvement did not end with the creation of these multilayered maps. They also developed a 3-D visualization tool that could be viewed at the Murray Lab. As the home to an 84-inch, 4K resolution 3-D display, the Murray Lab became a regular meeting spot where Mars 2020 scientists could &quot;fly&quot; around the landscapes of the two main potential landing sites (as well as a third, &quot;Midway,&quot; located midway between the two) and debate their merits.&nbsp;</p><p>The Mars 2020 team finally arrived at what Farley calls an &quot;excellent compromise&quot; solution. The rover, which will collect and ultimately cache samples for possible retrieval by a future mission, will land at Jezero and&mdash;if the mission lasts long enough&mdash;eventually head toward Midway.</p><p>&quot;We know how to land at both locations, so the cache would be safe at either place. And the value of multiple cached samples would be enhanced beyond what you&#39;d get at any one landing site,&quot; Farley says.&nbsp;</p><p>Sample retrieval aside, the Murray Lab has changed the way that landing sites will be evaluated, which could bring more potential partners into the lab for future projects, Dickson says. &quot;This has been a great vehicle for introducing people to the lab,&quot; he says.&nbsp;</p><p>All high-resolution data produced by The Murray Lab are available for streaming using Google Earth through the Murray Lab&#39;s website (<a href="http://murray-lab.caltech.edu/Mars2020/">murray-lab.caltech.edu/Mars2020/</a>). The Murray Lab has received support from Foster and Coco Stanback and the Twenty-Seven Foundation.</p>http://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/murray-lab-helps-scientists-see-themselves-mars-84690New Climate Model to Be Built from the Ground Uphttp://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/new-climate-model-be-built-ground-84636<p>Facing the certainty of a changing climate coupled with the uncertainty that remains in predictions of how it will change, scientists and engineers from across the country are teaming up to build a new type of climate model that is designed to provide more precise and actionable predictions.&nbsp;</p><p>Leveraging recent advances in the computational and data sciences, the comprehensive effort capitalizes on vast amounts of data that are now available and on increasingly powerful computing capabilities both for processing data and for simulating the earth system.&nbsp;</p><p>The new model will be built by a consortium of researchers led by Caltech, in partnership with MIT; the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS); and JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA. The consortium, dubbed the <a href="https://clima.caltech.edu">Climate Modeling Alliance</a> (CliMA), plans to fuse Earth observations and high-resolution simulations into a model that represents important small-scale features, such as clouds and turbulence, more reliably than existing climate models. The goal is a climate model that projects future changes in critical variables such as cloud cover, rainfall, and sea ice extent more accurately &ndash; with uncertainties at least two times smaller than existing models.</p><p>&quot;Projections with current climate models&mdash;for example, of how features such as rainfall extremes will change&mdash;still have large uncertainties, and the uncertainties are poorly quantified,&quot; says <a href="http://climate-dynamics.org/people/tapio-schneider/">Tapio Schneider</a>, Caltech&#39;s Theodore Y. Wu Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering, senior research scientist at JPL, and principal investigator of CliMA. &quot;For cities planning their stormwater management infrastructure to withstand the next 100 years&#39; worth of floods, this is a serious issue;&nbsp;concrete answers about the likely range of climate outcomes are key for planning.&quot;</p><p>The consortium will operate in a fast-paced, start-up-like atmosphere, and hopes to have the new model up and running within the next five years&mdash;an aggressive timeline for building a climate model essentially from scratch.&nbsp;</p><p>&quot;A fresh start gives us an opportunity to design the model from the outset to run effectively on modern and rapidly evolving computing hardware, and for the atmospheric and ocean models to be close cousins of each other, sharing the same numerical algorithms,&quot; says Frank Giraldo, professor of applied mathematics at NPS.</p><p>Current climate modeling relies on dividing up the globe into a grid and then computing what is going on in each sector of the grid, as well as how the sectors interact with each other. The accuracy of any given model depends in part on the resolution at which the model can view the earth&mdash;that is, the size of the grid&#39;s sectors. Limitations in available computer processing power mean that those sectors generally cannot be any smaller than tens of kilometers per side. But for climate modeling, the devil is in the details&mdash;details that get missed in a too-large grid.&nbsp;</p><p>For example, low-lying clouds have a significant impact on climate by reflecting sunlight, but the turbulent plumes that sustain them are so small that they fall through the cracks of existing models. Similarly, changes in Arctic sea ice have been linked to wide-ranging effects on everything from polar climate to drought in California, but it is difficult to predict how that ice will change in the future because it is sensitive to the density of cloud cover above the ice and the temperature of ocean currents below, both of which cannot be resolved by current models.</p><p>To capture the large-scale impact of these small-scale features, the team will develop high-resolution simulations that model the features in detail in selected regions of the globe. Those simulations will be nested within the larger climate model. The effect will be a model capable of &quot;zooming in&quot; on selected regions,&nbsp;providing detailed local climate information about those areasand informing the modeling of small-scale processes everywhere else.</p><p>&quot;The ocean soaks up much of the heat and carbon accumulating in the climate system. However, just how much it takes up depends on turbulent eddies in the upper ocean, which are too small to be resolved in climate models,&quot; says Raffaele Ferrari, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography at MIT. &quot;Fusing nested high-resolution simulations with newly available measurements from, for example, a fleet of thousands of autonomous floats could enable a leap in the accuracy of ocean predictions.&quot;</p><p>While existing models are often tested by checking predictions against observations, the new model will take ground-truthing a step further by using data-assimilation and machine-learning tools to &quot;teach&quot; the model to improve itself in real time, harnessing both Earth observations and the nested high-resolution simulations.&nbsp;</p><p>&quot;The success of&nbsp;computational weather forecasting demonstrates the power of using data to improve the accuracy of computer models; we aim to bring the same successes to climate prediction,&quot; says <a href="http://eas.caltech.edu/people/astuart">Andrew Stuart</a>, Caltech&#39;s Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences.</p><p>Each of the partner institutions brings a different strength and research expertise to the project. At Caltech, Schneider and Stuart will focus on creating the data-assimilation and machine-learning algorithms, as well as models for clouds, turbulence, and other atmospheric features. At MIT, Ferrari and John Marshall, also a Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography, will lead a team that will model the ocean, including its large-scale circulation and turbulent mixing. At NPS, Giraldo will lead the development of the computational core of the new atmosphere model in collaboration with Jeremy Kozdon and Lucas Wilcox. At JPL, a group of scientists will collaborate with the team at Caltech&#39;s campus to develop process models for the atmosphere, biosphere, and cryosphere.</p><p>Funding for this project is provided by the generosity of Eric and Wendy Schmidt (by recommendation of the&nbsp;<a href="https://schmidtfutures.com/" target="_blank">Schmidt Futures</a>&nbsp;program); Mission Control Earth, an initiative of Mountain Philanthropies;&nbsp;<a href="http://www.pgaphilanthropies.org/" target="_blank">Paul G. Allen Philanthropies</a>;&nbsp;the Heising-Simons Foundation; Blaine and Lynda Fetter; Deborah Castleman;&nbsp;Caltech trustee Charles Trimble;&nbsp;the Chair&#39;s Council of the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences;&nbsp;and the National Science Foundation. More information can be found at&nbsp;<a href="https://clima.caltech.edu/" target="_blank">https://clima.caltech.edu</a>.</p>http://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/new-climate-model-be-built-ground-84636JPL News: NASA's Voyager 2 Probe Enters Interstellar Spacehttp://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/jpl-news-nasas-voyager-2-probe-enters-interstellar-space-84606<p>For the second time in history, a human-made object has reached the space between the stars. NASA&#39;s <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/index.html">Voyager&nbsp;2</a> probe now has exited the heliosphere&mdash;the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun.</p><p>Members of NASA&#39;s Voyager team discussed the findings at a news conference today at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington.</p><p>Comparing data from different instruments aboard the trailblazing spacecraft, mission scientists determined the probe crossed the outer edge of the heliosphere on November 5. This boundary, called the heliopause, is where the tenuous, hot solar wind meets the cold, dense interstellar medium. Its twin, <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20130912.html">Voyager&nbsp;1</a>, crossed this boundary in 2012, but Voyager 2 carries a working instrument that will provide first-of-its-kind observations of the nature of this gateway into interstellar space.</p><p>&quot;There is still a lot to learn about the region of interstellar space immediately beyond the heliopause,&quot; said <a href="http://www.pma.caltech.edu/people/edward-c-stone">Ed Stone</a>, Voyager project scientist and the David Morrisroe Professor of Physics at Caltech.</p><p>Voyager&nbsp;2 now is slightly more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth. Mission operators still can communicate with Voyager&nbsp;2 as it enters this new phase of its journey, but information&mdash;moving at the speed of light&mdash;takes about 16.5 hours to travel from the spacecraft to Earth. By comparison, light traveling from the sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth.</p><p>Read the full story at <a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7301">JPL News</a>.</p>http://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/jpl-news-nasas-voyager-2-probe-enters-interstellar-space-84606JPL News: NASA InSight Lander Arrives on Martian Surfacehttp://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/jpl-news-nasa-insight-lander-arrives-martian-surface-84504<p>Mars has just received its newest robotic resident. NASA&#39;s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander successfully touched down on the Red Planet after an almost seven-month, 300-million-mile (458-million-kilometer) journey from Earth.</p><p>InSight&#39;s two-year mission will be to study the deep interior of Mars to learn how all celestial bodies with rocky surfaces, including Earth and the moon, formed.</p><p>InSight launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California May 5. The lander touched down Monday, Nov. 26, near Mars&#39; equator on the western side of a flat, smooth expanse of lava called Elysium Planitia, with a signal affirming a completed landing sequence at 11:52:59 a.m. PST (2:52:59 p.m. EST).</p><p>&quot;Today, we successfully landed on Mars for the eighth time in human history,&quot; said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. &quot;InSight will study the interior of Mars and will teach us valuable science as we prepare to send astronauts to the Moon and later to Mars. This accomplishment represents the ingenuity of America and our international partners, and it serves as a testament to the dedication and perseverance of our team. The best of NASA is yet to come, and it is coming soon.&quot;</p><p>The landing signal was relayed to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages for NASA, via NASA&#39;s two small experimental Mars Cube One (MarCO) CubeSats, which launched on the same rocket as InSight and followed the lander to Mars.</p><p>&quot;Every Mars landing is daunting, but now with InSight safely on the surface we get to do a unique kind of science on Mars,&quot; said JPL director Michael Watkins.</p><p><a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7293">Read the full story from JPL News</a></p>http://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/jpl-news-nasa-insight-lander-arrives-martian-surface-84504Nailing It: Caltech Engineers Help Show That InSight Lander Probe Can Hammer Itself Into Martian Soilhttp://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/nailing-it-caltech-engineers-help-show-insight-lander-probe-can-hammer-itself-martian-soil<p>On November 26, NASA&#39;s InSight lander will complete its six-and-a-half month journey to Mars, touching down at Elysium Planitia, a broad plain near the Martian equator that is home to the second largest volcanic region on the planet.</p><p>There, NASA scientists hope to &quot;give the Red Planet its first thorough checkup since it formed 4.5 billion years ago,&quot; according to the <a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/insight/">InSight mission website</a>. Previous missions have examined features on the surface, but many signatures of the planet&#39;s formation&mdash;which can provide clues about how all the terrestrial planets formed&mdash;can only be found by sensing and studying its &quot;vital signs&quot; far below the surface.</p><p>To check on those vital signs, InSight will come equipped with two main instrument packages: a seismometer for studying how seismic waves (for example, from marsquakes and meteorite impacts) travel through the planet and a &quot;mole&quot; that will burrow into the ground, dragging a tether with temperature sensors behind it to measure how temperatures change with depth on the planet. These instruments will tell scientists about Mars&#39;s interior structure (similar to the way an ultrasound lets doctors &quot;see&quot; inside a human body) and also about the heat flow from the planet&#39;s interior.</p><p>Engineers hope that the mole will reach a depth of between three and five meters&mdash;far enough down that it will be isolated from the temperature fluctuations of day and night and Mars&#39;s annual cycle on the surface above. Meters may not sound like much, but to dig that far using only equipment that can be launched on a spacecraft and controlled from 55 million miles away is a technical challenge that has never been attempted before.</p><p>Using a sliding weight inside its narrow body, the mole, which is 15.75 inches (400 millimeters) long and weighs just 1.9 pounds (860 grams), hammers itself into the ground, 1 mm at a time, while dragging a tether that is studded with 14 temperature sensors along its length. A traditional drill attempting to perform the same task would need to be as long as the hole it was attempting to drill&mdash;and would need a massive supporting structure. Were it to hammer continuously, the mole would take between a few hours to a few days to reach its final depth, depending on the characteristics of the soil. However, the mole will stop every 50 centimeters to measure the soil thermal conductivity, a process which requires periods of cooling and heating lasting several days. With the additional time needed to assess progress and send new commands, the mole could take six weeks or more to reach its final depth. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p>When designing the probe, engineers at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, wanted to be certain that the mole would be capable of reaching the necessary depth, and so they called on Caltech&#39;s <a href="http://eas.caltech.edu/people/jandrade">José Andrade</a>, George W. Housner Professor of Civil and Mechanical Engineering in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science and an expert on the physics of granular materials.</p><p>&quot;About five years ago, when the mole kept getting stuck during testing, the InSight team pulled together what&#39;s called a &#39;tiger team&#39;&mdash;a bunch of specialists from different areas who are brought in to help resolve an issue,&quot; Andrade says. &quot;I was called to serve on this tiger team as an expert in soil mechanics.&quot;</p><p>Because soil is a granular material&mdash;a conglomeration of solid particles that are each larger than a micrometer&mdash;it exhibits somewhat unusual properties. For example, soil composed of round particles will flow easily as the particles slide past one another, like sand in an hourglass. But soil composed of the same sizes of particles but with more jagged and angular shapes will lock together like puzzle pieces and cannot flow without significant outside force.</p><p>Granular materials can be described as singular objects that will deform based on their critical state plasticity&mdash;an idealized model for how groups of grains will force their way past one another as stress is applied to them. That plasticity is governed by air pressure and the force of gravity. As such, it is difficult to simulate in a laboratory the critical state plasticity of a granular material on Mars, which has one-third the gravity and 0.6 percent of the air pressure of Earth at sea level.</p><p>&quot;We kept trying to extrapolate how critical state plasticity would translate to Mars,&quot; Andrade says. &quot;Without knowing that, we could not effectively model how much resistance InSight&#39;s mole would face when attempting to drill through Mars&#39;s soil, and whether it could reach the desired depth. So, this sparked a clear need for more understanding.&quot;&nbsp;</p><div style="float: left; margin: 7px 15px 10px 0px; width: 360px;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GyZkJB25sx0?rel=0&amp;showinfo=1" width="360"></iframe><br /><span style="font-size: 12px; width: 90%; color: #333333;"><em>Credit: Caltech</em></span></div><p>To help investigate the mole&#39;s penetration in a granular material, Andrade and the InSight team hired postdoctoral researcher Ivan Vlahinic, who had recently completed a PhD at Northwestern University. Vlahinic set up tests in which early mock-ups of the mole were monitored and mathematically analyzed as they worked their way through a glass column filled with sand.</p><p>Andrade, Vlahinic, and their colleagues found that Mars&#39;s lower overburden pressure, compared to Earth, will actually make it&nbsp;<em>harder&nbsp;</em>for the mole to penetrate Mars&#39;s soil. Overburden pressure is the pressure on a layer of rock or sand exerted by the material stacked above it. At any given depth, the overburden pressure on Mars is one-third of Earth&#39;s, corresponding with the Red Planet&#39;s lower gravity. For the same packing fraction&mdash;the amount of space filled by material&mdash;the low pressure allows granular materials to exist in a looser state that actually increases the number of individual contacts that each grain has with its neighbors, and this increases the overall resistance of the material to penetration.</p><p>Vlahinic&#39;s research was eventually taken over by Jason Marshall, who earned a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 2014 and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech from 2015 to 2018.</p><p>&quot;We not only studied penetration, but also how heat moves through the soil,&quot; Marshall says. &quot;One of the things that InSight seeks to understand is how the temperature of the planet changes with depth. What we found is that as we&#39;re deforming the sand, the particles are obviously being rearranged, and that&#39;s going to affect the thermal conductivity measurements.&quot; As granular materials deform, the amount of space between the individual grains changes, adjusting the amount of space through which heat will either radiate or conduct via the planet&#39;s thin atmosphere. It also increases the number of grain-to-grain contacts as the soil is packed more tightly.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p>With this knowledge, Andrade was able to develop new computer models that helped the JPL team predict the mole&#39;s effectiveness in Martian soil. Unless the mole encounters an obstacle, he is confident that it will be successful.</p><p>&quot;The tests show that this thing can go much deeper than two meters. A dealbreaker could be a large formation of rock that blocks the path of the mole, but the InSight landing site selection team have chosen a location on Mars that is as rock-free as possible,&quot; he says. In addition, armed with Marshall&#39;s information on the effect of particle rearrangement on thermal conductivity, InSight should be in a good position to not only reach its desired depth, but also send back accurate information on the temperature at that depth, Andrade says.</p><p>For now, Andrade and his former postdocs can only watch&mdash;and wait. &quot;We&#39;ve done everything we could here on Earth. Now it&#39;s up to InSight,&quot; he says.</p>http://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/nailing-it-caltech-engineers-help-show-insight-lander-probe-can-hammer-itself-martian-soilNew Study Raises Questions About Salts Near Seasonally Darkening Streaks on Marshttp://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/new-study-raises-questions-about-salts-near-seasonally-darkening-streaks-mars-84470<p>A data-processing artifact may be responsible for evidence cited in a 2015 report that cold salty waters are responsible for forming seasonally dark streaks on the surface of Mars, according to a new study from Caltech.</p><p>The study, published online on November 9 by the journal&nbsp;<em>Geophysical Research Letters</em>, shows that a filtering step in the processing of data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) can, in rare circumstances, lead to signatures that mimic the appearance of certain minerals, including perchlorate&mdash;a salt whose presence would imply the existence of cold, salty waters at the surface of Mars.&nbsp;</p><p>MRO has been orbiting Mars since 2006, and during that time, CRISM has been capturing images of visible and infrared light reflected from the planet&#39;s surface. Different minerals absorb light at different wavelengths and so the fingerprints of the reflected light provide clues about what minerals might be present at a given location.&nbsp;</p><p>In 2015, scientists analyzing CRISM images found absorption patterns in a few pixels of the images that appeared to indicate concentrations of perchlorate. The pixels where CRISM detected perchlorate were associated with seasonally changing dark streaks on the slopes of Martian craters (formally named &quot;recurring slope linae,&quot; or RSLs), sparking the idea that the dark streaks were, in fact, caused by salty flowing liquid water. The existence of perchlorate brines on Mars has been the subject of speculation and debate ever since.</p><p>While analyzing CRISM images of the potential landing sites for the Mars 2020 rover, the Caltech-led research team noted the same strong perchlorate-like signatures in a few of the pixels. That team, led by <a href="http://www.gps.caltech.edu/people/bethany-l-ehlmann">Bethany Ehlmann</a>, professor of planetary science at Caltech and research scientist at JPL, includes Caltech graduate student Ellen Leask and Murat Dundar, an associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.</p><p>&quot;Potential residues of salty perchlorate waters at Mars 2020 landing sites would have been big news. We were about to report it, but I wanted to take a second look at the data,&quot; says Ellen Leask, lead author of the study.</p><p>The second look led to a vigorous analysis, conducted over a year with the CRISM team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, that revealed that when CRISM data are processed, certain &quot;noisy&quot; pixels that occur at the boundary between the light and dark part of an image can be misinterpreted. These pixels have errant spikes in their absorption patterns that, coupled with the signature of carbon dioxide in Mars&#39; atmosphere, are processed in such a way that the end result mimics the absorption pattern from certain hydrated minerals. Those minerals include alunite, kieserite, serpentine, and especially perchlorate, all of which are characteristic of wet environments. The team found the error occurs in less than 0.05 percent of the pixels in all of the CRISM images and only affects very small spots in the images (covering less than 12 pixels).</p><p>Armed with this new information, Leask took a fresh look at the published literature of mineral detections on Mars from CRISM. Although the majority of the previous orbital detections of alunite, kieserite, and serpentine could be re-confirmed, none of the perchlorate detections reported in published literature remained convincing, says Ehlmann.</p><p>&quot;Ellen&#39;s careful sleuthing revealed this issue,&quot; Ehlmann says. &quot;It&#39;s a case study in the importance of critical skepticism of even one&#39;s own data.&quot;</p><p>The study is titled <a href="http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20181121-071639184">&quot;Challenges in the Search for Perchlorate and Other Hydrated Minerals with 2.1-μm Absorptions on Mars.&quot;</a> Scott Murchie and Frank Seelos of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory are also coauthors. This research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, NASA, the Rose Hills Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.</p>http://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/new-study-raises-questions-about-salts-near-seasonally-darkening-streaks-mars-84470JPL News: NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Roverhttp://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/jpl-news-nasa-announces-landing-site-mars-2020-rover-84457<p>NASA has chosen Jezero Crater as the landing site for its upcoming Mars 2020 rover mission after a five-year search, during which details of more than 60 candidate locations on the Red Planet were scrutinized and debated by the mission team and the planetary science community.</p><p>The rover mission is scheduled to launch in July 2020 as NASA&#39;s next step in exploration of the Red Planet. It will not only seek signs of ancient habitable conditions&mdash;and past microbial life&mdash;but the rover also will collect rock and soil samples and store them in a cache on the planet&#39;s surface. NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) are studying future mission concepts to retrieve the samples and return them to Earth, so this landing site sets the stage for the next decade of Mars exploration.</p><p>Jezero Crater is located on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator. Western Isidis presents some of the oldest and most scientifically interesting landscapes Mars has to offer. Mission scientists believe the 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) crater, once home to an ancient river delta, could have collected and preserved ancient organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life from the water and sediments that flowed into the crater billions of years ago.</p><p>&quot;The Mars community has long coveted the scientific value of sites such as Jezero Crater, and a previous mission contemplated going there, but the challenges with safely landing were considered prohibitive,&quot; said&nbsp;<a href="http://www.gps.caltech.edu/people/kenneth-a-farley">Ken Farley</a>, the W. M. Keck Foundation Professor of Geochemistry and project scientist for Mars 2020 at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA. &quot;But what was once out of reach is now conceivable, thanks to the 2020 engineering team and advances in Mars entry, descent and landing technologies.&quot;</p><p><a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7286">Read the full story from JPL News</a></p>http://divisions.caltech.edu/sitenewspage-index/jpl-news-nasa-announces-landing-site-mars-2020-rover-84457